Pod::Simple

SYNOPSIS

TODO

DESCRIPTION

Pod::Simple is a Perl library for parsing text in the Pod ("plain old
documentation") markup language that is typically used for writing
documentation for Perl and for Perl modules. The Pod format is explained
perlpod; the most common formatter is called perldoc
.

Pod formatters can use Pod::Simple to parse Pod documents and render them into
plain text, HTML, or any number of other formats. Typically, such formatters
will be subclasses of Pod::Simple, and so they will inherit its methods, like
parse_file
.

If you're reading this document just because you have a Pod-processing
subclass that you want to use, this document (plus the documentation for the
subclass) is probably all you need to read.

If you're reading this document because you want to write a formatter
subclass, continue reading it and then read Pod::Simple::Subclassing, and
then possibly even read perlpodspec (some of which is for parser-writers,
but much of which is notes to formatter-writers).

MAIN METHODS

$parser = SomeClass->new();

This returns a new parser object, where SomeClass is a subclass
of Pod::Simple.

$parser->output_fh(*OUT);

This sets the filehandle that $parser
's output will be written to.
You can pass *STDOUT
, otherwise you should probably do something
like this:

This sets the string that $parser
's output will be sent to,
instead of any filehandle.

$parser->parse_file( $some_filename );

$parser->parse_file(*INPUT_FH);

This reads the Pod content of the file (or filehandle) that you specify,
and processes it with that $parser
object, according to however
$parser
's class works, and according to whatever parser options you
have set up for this $parser
object.

$parser->parse_string_document( $all_content );

This works just like parse_file
except that it reads the Pod
content not from a file, but from a string that you have already
in memory.

$parser->parse_lines( ...@lines..., undef );

This processes the lines in @lines
(where each list item must be a
defined value, and must contain exactly one line of content -- so no
items like "foo\nbar"
are allowed). The final undef is used to
indicate the end of document being parsed.

The other parser_whatever methods are meant to be called only once
per $parser
object; but parse_lines
can be called as many times per
$parser
object as you want, as long as the last call (and only
the last call) ends with an undef value.

$parser->content_seen

This returns true only if there has been any real content seen
for this document.

SomeClass->filter( $filename );

SomeClass->filter( *INPUT_FH );

SomeClass->filter( \$document_content );

This is a shortcut method for creating a new parser object, setting the
output handle to STDOUT, and then processing the specified file (or
filehandle, or in-memory document). This is handy for one-liners like
this:

perl -MPod::Simple::Text -e "Pod::Simple::Text->filter('thingy.pod')"

SECONDARY METHODS

Some of these methods might be of interest to general users, as
well as of interest to formatter-writers.

Note that the general pattern here is that the accessor-methods
read the attribute's value with $value = $parser->attribute
and set the attribute's value with
$parser->attribute(newvalue). For each accessor, I typically
only mention one syntax or another, based on which I think you are actually
most likely to use.

$parser->no_whining( SOMEVALUE )

If you set this attribute to a true value, you will suppress the
parser's complaints about irregularities in the Pod coding. By default,
this attribute's value is false, meaning that irregularities will
be reported.

Note that turning this attribute to true won't suppress one or two kinds
of complaints about rarely occurring unrecoverable errors.

$parser->no_errata_section( SOMEVALUE )

If you set this attribute to a true value, you will stop the parser from
generating a "POD ERRORS" section at the end of the document. By
default, this attribute's value is false, meaning that an errata section
will be generated, as necessary.

$parser->complain_stderr( SOMEVALUE )

If you set this attribute to a true value, it will send reports of
parsing errors to STDERR. By default, this attribute's value is false,
meaning that no output is sent to STDERR.

Setting complain_stderr
also sets no_errata_section
.

$parser->source_filename

This returns the filename that this parser object was set to read from.

$parser->doc_has_started

This returns true if $parser
has read from a source, and has seen
Pod content in it.

$parser->source_dead

This returns true if $parser
has read from a source, and come to the
end of that source.

$parser->strip_verbatim_indent( SOMEVALUE )

The perlpod spec for a Verbatim paragraph is "It should be reproduced
exactly...", which means that the whitespace you've used to indent your
verbatim blocks will be preserved in the output. This can be annoying for
outputs such as HTML, where that whitespace will remain in front of every
line. It's an unfortunate case where syntax is turned into semantics.

If the POD your parsing adheres to a consistent indentation policy, you can
have such indentation stripped from the beginning of every line of your
verbatim blocks. This method tells Pod::Simple what to strip. For two-space
indents, you'd use:

$parser->strip_verbatim_indent(' ');

For tab indents, you'd use a tab character:

$parser->strip_verbatim_indent("\t");

If the POD is inconsistent about the indentation of verbatim blocks, but you
have figured out a heuristic to determine how much a particular verbatim block
is indented, you can pass a code reference instead. The code reference will be
executed with one argument, an array reference of all the lines in the
verbatim block, and should return the value to be stripped from each line. For
example, if you decide that you're fine to use the first line of the verbatim
block to set the standard for indentation of the rest of the block, you can
look at the first line and return the appropriate value, like so:

If you'd rather treat each line individually, you can do that, too, by just
transforming them in-place in the code reference and returning undef. Say
that you don't want any lines indented. You can do something like this:

$new->strip_verbatim_indent(sub {

my $lines = shift;

sub { s/^\s+// for @{ $lines },

return undef;

});

CAVEATS

This is just a beta release -- there are a good number of things still
left to do. Notably, support for EBCDIC platforms is still half-done,
an untested.